Warehouse Management System

A warehouse management system, or WMS, is a set of policies and processes, today almost always implemented as computer software, intended to organize the work of a warehouse or distribution center by recording the arrival and departure of inventory so the facility can operate efficiently and meet its objectives. Basic implementations do little more than track where stock is located and how much space it occupies, while advanced systems coordinate labor, measure performance, integrate with transportation and manufacturing systems, and exchange data in real time with other software; some smaller operations still rely on simple spreadsheets or handwritten records rather than a dedicated system. Twentieth-century usage of the term warehouse management information system distinguished the software itself from the underlying management theory it implements, and a warehouse management system can run on cloud-based or on-premises computing without a fundamental limit on its capability, provided the underlying computing resources and data synchronization are adequate.